Survivor's Guilt
by Sunruner
Summary: A "What if?" ficlet. Eight against two are pretty solid odds, but when the divine plan goes awry it'll be left to someone else to fire Mars Lighthouse instead. Rated for gore. Duskshipping hurrah!


**Heheh... Oops, I totally skipped my British Literature class yesterday to write this fic instead. I then skipped my American Poetry class this morning to proof and post it! Bad Sunny! Bad, bad girl!**

**Hell if I care, DUSKY DUSK DUSK!**

**So here you go, another one of my "What if?" scenarios!**

**First line is intentionally bolded, not a format error.**

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_**Survivor's Guilt**_

"**This is most unexpected..."**

Who said that?

It took a very long time before she could bring herself to move again. It was at least a few minutes, but her mind easily extended it to hours trapped in a blurred, broken reality. The air was cold, chilling where it touched the patches of drying blood on her skin. The red tiles under her body sizzled with heat, adding another pain to the daunting list her mind was sluggishly beginning to recognize and order.

Someone, but not her, was crying. It was a very distant sound, picked up and carried away by the wind she could hear echoing in the chamber. It was a strange, forlorn thing.

"_F-Faran... daddy... Please... no..."_

Karst was happy when it stopped.

She opened her eyes slowly to the red of the Lighthouse walls and floor. Darkness hung like a heavy fog, a glimmer of firelight behind her just enough to let her make out a few formless shapes in the murk. She managed not to fall asleep again, and finally forced herself to catalogue the cuts and bruises riddling her body. That's right, there had been a fight. She remembered that now.

A fight against who?

"_My Clan... I've failed you..."_

"Mars above." Agatio?

"Whe-re are you?" Her voice skipped from disuse, not emotion. Karst lay quiet, closing her eyes for a moment as she listened to the man moving in the cloudy air. He huffed and gasped before she heard heavy boots scuffing the broken floor and rattle the loose tiles. Why was he so strong when she could hardly move? The answer was simple and stupid, she shouldn't have had to ask: he was carrying the Mars Star.

And that's right! That's why they'd been fighting! The Mars Star, in the same Lighthouse, they'd stood before that alter and had faced the Stone of Sages! Was that who they'd fought? She couldn't remember, she didn't think so. But what if it had been? She was lucky to be alive then. They both were.

"Here, drink this." He swore before speaking to her, Karst's narrow field of vision blocked by his wide knee as he knelt down in front of her. He awkwardly shifted her head around, ignorant of the wide gash on her side that protested to being twisted around like a doll. She didn't complain though, just let him tip something cold and wet into her mouth and swallowing it with her minor resentment. The tiles quickly stopped burning her skin and she knew her sight improved, the blanket of pain rolling itself up into a persistent sting.

"What happened?" Her voice was still weak but she made it work, slowly setting herself to the task of sitting up straight- without his help.

"_Mom, dad, Felix... don't leave me alone..."_

"We killed them."

"Them?" She looked up at him. His deep blue face-paint was smudged beyond recognition, crusted along one side by a now-dry splash of blood that had poured down from a nasty gash on his scalp. His armoured chest was badly beaten, but the muscle underneath appeared well and whole as he moved. He was missing most of his left ear.

"Get up and look." His eyes didn't tell her much, and his tone was crass as she scowled and slowly rose to her own feet and looked around the shattered room. He was too smug with that Star hanging from his belt. "The little one was crying, her tears are still wet." Much too smug.

"Little one..?"

She moved past him like it was still a dream, everything so casual and surreal as one of the formless shapes on the ground formed a pair of sightless green eyes. The girl's yellow hair was a wet mop of blood and ash, the body completely inanimate with one leg missing below the knee. Her hands were burnt beyond repair.

"Karst?"

"_Hamma... wait..."_

She couldn't move her limbs, just her eyes as they found a charred arm attached to a still body, wrapped in burnt wool and armour. The skin and muscle had been eaten away by the heat, but the white bones were still wrapped tightly around the handle of a smashed ankh. Of what had been a head of cerulean hair, only a few strands were left along the very edge of the blackened skull.

"Forgive me, please, please forgive me..." It wasn't her voice, she hadn't uttered a sound yet. It was the man, old, his scholar's robe dwarfing his shrunken figure as he huddled over one of the other still forms. "Please, please, I'm begging you, Jenna. Please, please I never meant for this- I'm sorry, I'm so, so... Jenna? Jenna no- please, Jenna _no!_" The words were anxious, fleeting, and entirely without volume. She could barely hear the sage's frantic pleading, her eyes watching as the toe of a boot twitched weakly, then went still as the other woman expired.

"_Uncle... Majesty... Uncle..."_

The sage crumpled in on himself, then combed back over the bodies, completely unaware of the Proxians watching him. Agatio betrayed no judgement, and neither did Karst, but she knew her reasons for keeping quiet were entirely different. She felt cold. Numb. Something in her was shaking.

"I'm begging you, Piers. Please, hear an old man's voice..." There was something disgusting about watching his pain, grotesque about standing there in the wake of such violent deaths and not moving away from the stink and the sight. It made her skin crawl and her insides freeze as she heard the wind again, repeating for her now as she heard the words and not just the voices. Final words...

"_Kay... Aaron... be strong..."_

"No! No, Garet, don't-_!_"

"Help him, Agatio." Her voice surprised her, she hadn't meant to speak. She looked over her shoulder at him, shocked to see the disapproval written across his face. He shook his head at her.

"We can't."

"Why not?"

"We have to move on." What? What was that supposed to mean? She just stared at him, petrified as that frozen sensation crawled up her throat from the ball of ice in her stomach. "We have to worry about our mission, not the collateral."

Mission? Collateral? What mission? That one? The one hanging from his belt, the one he wore like a badge of honour? The same mission they'd been told they couldn't fulfil before- _this?_ Was that was he was talking about?

"Karst-" He sensed what was coming, his tone was a warning but she just-

"This wasn't our mission!" They were her words, but not her voice as she rounded on him. She tried to feel angry but instead that other voice was in her mouth, foiling her attempts. There was another woman in the room, somewhere close by: shrieking, hysterical, too upset to be angry and too scared to be upset. Some woman who wasn't her had this to say, and she was going to do it. Let him glare! It didn't matter what he thought!

"Jupiter Lighthouse-"

"_Different!"_ How so? She didn't have an answer for that, but he didn't ask the question either so that was alright. She didn't know how it was different, she couldn't remember that far back, not right now.

"Why are you arguing with me? This is what you wanted- Isaac dead and Menardi-" WOAH. STOP.

"She isn't Isaac!" She screamed, one hand behind her and pointing to the still body with those green eyes staring at nothing. "Neither is he! Or that one over there!" The boy with the thick red hair had gurgled blood and now lay still like the others. The scholar was staring at her as she shouted at her clansman. "We were done with them, we didn't need this: why did it happen!"

"_Get a grip!_" Agatio was a big man, with a big voice-

No! He couldn't shock her into silence, there was too much around her as she felt her feet carry her into the midst of the carnage. A single violet eye peered up at her through a film of blood, but that sightless haze was slowly creeping up from the violent rip across his chest. He was just a boy, but blood was sluggishly dribbling past the shattered white bones of his opened torso.

The Lighthouse had killed the sailor already, one side of his body burnt and shrivelled. Some sort of acid had bubbled away most of his jaw. She mistakenly looked down to see one ruptured eye oozing puss and melted jelly down into the raw, exposed nasal cavity. He wasn't breathing anymore, he couldn't feel it.

"Karst! It was them or us. They had the advantage in numbers: eight against two and none of them ran away! It was a battle and we beat them, if the Wise One was so dead-set against us then why didn't it interfere and save them? Why did it let us win? I'll tell you why: _because we won!_"

Karst choked on bile, feeling a little of it burn past the corner of her mouth. Her insides revolted at the reality in front of her, she was a warrior, not a butcher. Defending your home was not the same as... as... whatever _this_ was supposed to be!

"This is wrong..."

"Of course it is." He snarled viciously, his eyes burning holes in her from behind as she tried to find a single tile on the floor not smeared or out-right covered in blood. "Now pull yourself together!" There was so much of it in a person. Blood.

"...No." Eight against two, they shouldn't have won. But eight against two meant both parties had fought. The scholar made nine, and he was still alive, so that meant... "...No."

If she had swallowed a metal hook and slowly pulled it up through her throat it might have hurt less. She could have coped better. She could have taken it. Instead the hysteria just melted away and she sealed one hand over her mouth to bar anymore sounds from getting loose. There was the merchant boy and the divine child, the healing girl and the sailor. Then the brute and the sister.

The last two weren't far away, but some sort of blast had sent them off into the corner of the room. The light didn't reach that far, it was dark, but she could still see them.

The one she hated, at first glance, looked fine. It was like he was merely shocked and staring into space. His eyes moved and showed a hint of lucidity, but then one could see how the front of his body was drenched in blood coming down from his scarf. Something thin and sharp had pierced his throat from behind, and each slow, shallow breath was hailed by the painful gurgle of lungs slowly drowning in red. One of his knees was bent the wrong way, and he had no left hand. Beside him...

She couldn't look at his body, just his face with its closed eyes and still expression. The closer she got, the more she could see of him, how he'd changed. Pain and worry lines creased a face too many years young for them, and she soundlessly knelt down next to him where he lay. She took off her gloves carefully, then touched him. Cold skin, clammy. Dying.

"_No_..." She whispered. His eyes started to flutter but couldn't open. They struggled and then stopped, then started again until she finally laid her other hand over them to make him stop. "Not you..." Not him, it wasn't supposed to be him. She'd been furious at the Lighthouse, suspicious, paranoid even, but once they'd obtained the Star and left Atteka behind she had been able to let those feelings go. Felix wouldn't pursue them, he would go to Prox and collect his parents. Barring that, he would go to the Lighthouse and see them through till the end. No more threats, no more violence.

Why had this happened instead?

"W-What are you doing?" The sage's voice again, far far away across the shattered chamber.

"Coup de grace." Her partner's voice was flat.

"Ivan... Ivan I'm so sorry..." Agatio knew how to end a life. His blade sliced, never hacked or tugged. With a surgeon's precision it was done. Karst could hear the blood splashing and sticking as he walked between the bodies. She closed her eyes and leaned down a little, thankful for the moment's privacy.

"Felix..." Her fingers moved from his face down to his hand, face close to his and willing away the smell of blood. She looked at him and saw his eyes begin to struggle again, his fingers twitching between hers and tightening. It wasn't a squeeze, but it was deliberate. She brushed his fluttering eyes open, feeling the lashes breathe past her fingers before his dull, clouding brown eyes looked up at her. They showed too much pain and exhaustion for emotion.

"You're cold." She murmured.

He didn't nod, his neck bending but not far enough to even lift his head off the floor. His eyes moved as she took her hand from his, but after a single painful grunt he was braced against her. There was no explanation for the dying man, nor any protests from him. But there was judgement from the other.

"T... Traitor." Isaac's voice was rough, laboured, and those lucid blue eyes were harsh.

In her arms Felix couldn't turn to face his accuser, and with them both in such a state Karst couldn't bring herself to act against him. Felix just looked at her carefully, then bent his neck again as far as it would go. He assented. Traitor.

But his eyes kept moving and refocusing. When he opened his mouth blood spilled down from his lips like an overflowing cup, bubbling slowly when he exhaled. He looked at her cheeks, then her eyes, then back to her tear-stained face. A question.

"Just because." Her answer.

"_We failed, how could we fail?"_

By the time Agatio came to get her Isaac's resentment had burnt itself down to cold ashes behind his filmy blue eyes.

Felix's last words were: _"Light the beacon."

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**Not quite a 'Fin', but it stands on it's own for now. Now, if this gets "updated" it won't be a plot-driven story, just some more blerby-bits and re-written scenes. Possibly (read: POSSIBLY) with images of characters' home-towns and receiving the news.**

**So yeah, I can't be the only one who's ever thought of this, or written on it. But if you liked it then review?**


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